This Early SSD Was WILD

[erek]

"Today we're looking at the iRAM, and early (and wild) SSD from 2006. A slightly cursed idea at the time, but how does it stack up in 2025?"


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrRNKjWxCPY

 

[Axman]

I wanted one of those so bad back in the day...

 

[El_Capitan]

It's still a great idea now even without a battery for caching photo and video editors. I use a RAMDisk for that, but takes up my available RAM.

 

[pendragon1]

the owner of the shop i worked at had one similar that we played with. worked alright for temp storage.

 

[LukeTbk]

It's still a great idea now even without a battery for caching photo and video editors. I use a RAMDisk for that, but takes up my available RAM.

I think that what the CLX memory expansion do:
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-com...d-for-trx50-and-w790-workstation-motherboards

Some are pure extra ram when you do not have channel left, some offer persistence, CXL offer coherent memory in a way those did not, so they appear as actual extra ram I think instead of harddrive.

 

[twin_savage]

I've still got an ACARD ramdisk with it's external power brick so that it could stay powered up even when you shut down you PC:

It claims it could run up to 64GBs of memory but the biggest unregistered DDR2 memory I ever found was only 4GB per stick.

 

[GoldenTiger]

Yawn, I had a real ssd (64gb) in 2008. It was a 64gb slc one.

 

[freeagentt]

Pretty sure OCZ made one of these, but for DDR1? I seem to remember guys trying 2-2-2 stuff to see if it would effect some benchmarks.

Maybe I am trippin.

 

[KazeoHin]

What's insane is modern SSDs can beat DDR2 in nearly all aspects...

 

[LukeTbk]

If you remove the huge latency advantage of the ram by going through the pci-express I imagine so.

 

[kirbyrj]

Pretty sure OCZ made one of these, but for DDR1? I seem to remember guys trying 2-2-2 stuff to see if it would effect some benchmarks.

Maybe I am trippin.

I remember Gigabyte had a DDR1 version.

 

[freeagentt]

I remember Gigabyte had a DDR1 version.

Maybe it was that with OCZ ram.. getting old gets confusing lol.

 

[cpufrost]

Great place to keep log files.
Power cycle = instant secure destruction!

 

[Red Falcon]

I think that what the CLX memory expansion do:
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-com...d-for-trx50-and-w790-workstation-motherboards

Some are pure extra ram when you do not have channel left, some offer persistence, CXL offer coherent memory in a way those did not, so they appear as actual extra ram I think instead of harddrive.

CLX is certainly the modern iteration of this.
I can't believe we are moving back to RAM on expansion buses like we did in the 1980s and earlier... the pendulum swings back the other way.

 

[The Mad Atheist]

Seen this back in the day.
I have a 2x 8GB set of DDR4 3200 laptop RAM sitting around.
Shame there isn't a PCIE card so I could use the set as a RAM cache or boost.

 

[Grebuloner]

Seen this back in the day.
I have a 2x 8GB set of DDR4 3200 laptop RAM sitting around.
Shame there isn't a PCIE card so I could use the set as a RAM cache or boost.

There is, actually. How much do you want to spend for it? (Plus a pair of sodimm to dimm adapters)

Marvell 2404

 

[mwroobel]

If you think this is wild, you should look up the ZeusRAM from STC (Now WD.) We used to use a shitload of them as ZFS ZIL cache, they were the shit at the time. Faster than anything else at the time, but f you looked at them the wrong way they would flake, and then the issues would make you consider suicide.